Category: Health Systems

There is still much to be done, of course. But Sierra Leone is on its way to a health system that meets the needs of its people—and, given the toll that Ebola took, is ready to confront the next infectious disease—be it Ebola or some other virus—with stronger, better-prepared health services.

In support of global efforts to strengthen, scale up, and harmonize community health programs, the Advancing Partners & Communities project launched the Community Health Systems Catalog in March 2014. The Catalog aims to fill a knowledge gap about community health and family planning policies and programs in 25 countries. Previously, this information was scattered across policies, strategies, curricula, and other documents. In 2017, APC updated the Catalog as part of its portfolio of tools and activities that support the role of policy in aligning and strengthening community health systems.

In Liberia, Ebola survivors come from every county, background, and profession. While they have all lived through trauma and loss, they have much more than Ebola in common. They are proud, resilient, and like many citizens of the country, hopeful about the future. They want the world to hear their needs but not define them by a virus.

Ebola survivors have an abundance of medical and psychological problems: musculoskeletal conditions that cause joint stiffness; ocular conditions that can lead to cataracts and blindness; anxiety disorders, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder—to name a few—all of which require specialized medical care. More resources need to be directed to helping survivors get appropriate health care and mental health services.

JSI’s assistance, through the Health Services Project, enabled three new levels of mental health and psychosocial care and support that resulted in programming that is fully integrated into the Acehnese public health system structure, increasing potential for replication.

Having deployed OpenLMIS in three countries, JSI has experienced first-hand how dynamic the environment is. A more modular version with plug and play features will provide much needed flexibility to meet the evolving demands of tomorrow’s health supply chains.

When we first started this work (in Ethiopia) about seven years ago, when customers came to a warehouse in search of their medicines, the pharmacist had to run down to the warehouse to check if they had an item (it took too long to find the stock card). Now they can access the data the same way as my Walgreens pharmacist can. And they can look to see if the stock is available at any of the other warehouses (even if the nearest location might be a day away).

In 2013, JSI began assessing the quality of the data collected on six key indicators related to HIV by performing data quality assessments at health facilities in Mozambique. These assessments evaluate data collected at the facility level and compare recorded data to data captured at the national level in order to determine discrepancies and improve overall data quality.

The resilience of a health system is to not only withstand sudden disasters, natural or man-made, but to also deal with the slow, progressive crisis that erodes the ability to meet a growing demand of health services from the population.